Well, another fantastic Resilience Festival enters the history books! We at Transition Guelph want to extend a HUGE thank you to everyone who helped make this festival a resounding success: to everyone who attended, everyone who brought wonderful food to Saturday's Earth Hour pot-luck dinner, to our festival planning team (you folks are incredible!), to our amazing keynote speakers Chris Martenson, Tina Clarke and Mayor Farbridge, to everyone who organized and/or facilitated a workshop or other event, to all of our generous sponsors and partner organizations and businesses (complete list here), to our terrific performers Nabi and Jenikz and their bands, to Doug Prest of SolarG for providing the solar-charged batteries and Chrismas lights for the Earth Hour dinner, and to all of our incredible army of volunteers who pitched in with all their energy and commitment to make this festival happen. THANK YOU ALL!

Transition Guelph is a grassroots, citizen-led organization whose goal is to strengthen our community's resilience, enhance its sustainability and improve quality of life for all of our city's inhabitants.

Our global community faces many challenges, now and in the coming years: our climate is changing rapidly, natural resources and sources of non-renewable energy are depleting, renewable resources are being drawn down faster than they can be replenished, and ecosystems all over the globe are under ever-increasing stress.

It's the goal of the global Transition movement to build communities that can survive and thrive under these changing conditions, and have the ability to respond to these challenges creatively, constructively, and collaboratively.

This Year's Theme was Energy

The challenges we face as a global society in the years ahead mean that we will need to rethink many of the basic assumptions we have around our use of energy. There is mounting evidence that the changes to our climate, the oceans, arctic ecosystems and the deteriorating quality of our air and water are in large part due to our ever-increasing thirst for energy, particularly in the form of fossil fuels.

Not only that, fossil fuels are a limited, non-renewable resource that even now are becoming harder and harder to extract at rates that meet our demand and costs that are afforable. So, even if our fossil fuel use was otherwise completely benign, we would still, sooner or later, need to re-examine how we get our energy, and how we use it. Many of the workshops and other events offered in this year's festival, including our keynote address by Chris Martenson, focused on this important aspect of our daily lives.

We believe it's far better to be proactive than reactive. We want to encourage people to look at our energy consumption and think seriously about how we can do it better.

We squander a lot of energy in our daily lives, and we don't need to. We use far more energy than we have to. We can replace polluting, non-renewable sources of energy with infinitely available, clean sources. We can do it, and we need to do it. And that's what we wanted to focus on in this year's festival, and also going forward with other Transition Guelph initiatives this year.

There is already much good work being done in our community! Many local organizations are working hard to build a secure future in everything from water management and protection to urban tree-cover restoration, community gardening, local Community Shared Agriculture, food-forest planting, land stewardship, forming neighbourhood associations, developing and promoting sources of renewable energy, and the preservation of heritage seeds and livestock. And that is what the Resilience festival wants to celebrate. But there is still much more to do, and that's the other side of the Resilience Festivals, to enlighten, inspire, educate and engage.

So stay tuned. There are lots of Transition Guelph events coming up this year (check out some of our festival follow-up events here) and lots of opportunities to get involved, and bring your vision, your energy and your passion to help co-create a better, more sustainable future!

And check back soon; we'll be posting pictures and videos from this year's festival in a few days! Meanwhile, check out the Resilience 2011 photo gallery for images of last year's festival.